Buffoonery, fooling around and disguises, supported by graceful music, turned out to be excellent material for the young performers, who eagerly and with commitment devoted themselves to realising this story.

Led by an experienced, international group of producers (Jan Willem de Vriend – musical director, Eva Buchmann – director, Zuzanna Markiewicz – set design and costumes) they created a performance full of humour and youthful temperament, visually stylised for the 1950s. [...]

The whole thing was served with taste and panache, free from banality and pompous pretentiousness. One could get the impression that everyone was having a great time, starting from the conductor, climbing over the railing to the place designated for him, through the orchestra moving lightly through Haydn’s score, to the soloists, who boldly undertook the difficult acting tasks.

The performance was full of inner nerve and refined dramaturgy, so the two-hour work maintained the coherence and continuity of the narrative. The young performers coped very well with the difficult art of recitative, which went beyond simple melorecitations explaining the course of the plot. It was then that the acting was most effective, which was also due to the inspiring and witty accompaniment (hammerklavier, chitarrone, cello). The arias were also evocatively interpreted and set in specific stage situations, and yet they did not lose their show values. And the skills presented by the young vocalists guarantee success on professional opera stages to several of them.